Space
Access 12 Conference Review
A report on the annual Space
Access Society's annual conference in
Phoenix, Arizona. The focus, as always, was
on efforts by entrepreneurial companies to
achieve dramatically lower costs for getting
to space..
NewSpace
2011 Conference Review
A report on the annual Space
Frontier Foundation's conference held
at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California.
Topics of discussion ranged from entrepreneurial
space businesses to lunar miing to fully reusable
suborbital space vehicles.
Here is the latest Virtual
SpaceTV 3D show, which was created by BINARY
SPACE with story content from HobbySpace.
Virtual presenter Amanda Bush devotes her program to
a recounting of the successful SpaceX
Falcon 9/Dragon mission to the International Space Station.
This was the first time a commercially designed, built
and operated spacecraft berthed to an orbiting station.
The Dragon delivered several hundred kilograms of supplies
and also returned safely with cargo from the station
to a splashdown off the coast of California. The Virtual
SpaceTV program ends with spaceweather-man
James C. Birk reporting on the annular
eclipse in May and the June 5th Venus
transit.
These videos are intended as demonstrations of an experimental
technique for generating animated presentations. The
show was generated autonomously by software according
to a text script. The project is described in the Virtual
Producer whitepaper (pdf). For further information
contact info@binary-space.com. (Note that the virtual
voices continue to move towards a more natural sound.)
Professional astronomers have neither
the time nor the telescopes needed to
gather data on the brightness changes
of thousands of variables, and amateurs
make a real and useful contribution to
science by observing variable stars and
submitting their observations to the AAVSO
International Database.
This week the AAVSO released the results
of AAVSO
Photometric All-Sky Survey (APASS) that
has been underway since 2009. The group
operates one observing station in Chile
and the other in Mexico and so can see both
hemispheres of the sky. They are halfway
through the project and have collected date
for "42 million objects in about 95%
of the sky".
In the on-going project, the two AVSO
observatories each night to measure the
intensity
of the light in about 60 small patches
or fields of the sky with a set of five
different filters.
These photometry measurements will show
whether a star's brightness is varying
over time.
In the past two years, 95% of the sky
has been observed twice and the remainder
once.
The goal in the remaining two years is
to cover the entire sky with at least
4 visits for
each field.
(Credit: E. Los)
It's
a Whole New Outer Space Out There
SpaceX Launches Falcon 9
with Dragon Spacecraft Dragon Berths to the International Space Station
The young company SpaceX
launched its Falcon
9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on May
22nd. It carried the firm's Dragon
spacecraft on a test flight to the International
Space Station. The mission was to demonstrate
that SpaceX can begin regular deliveries
of cargo to the station.
..
A crowd of SpaceX employees watched the
launch from the company's headquarters in
Hawthorne, California. They make a big cheer
when the first and second stages separate
successfully:
..
After reaching orbit, Dragon began a two
day journey to the station in which it carried
out a number tests and maneuvers to demonstrate
that all systems were working properly.
On May 25th, the Dragon approached the
station in a series of carefully planned
steps to prove that it could stop and reverse
its movement at any time via commands from
the ground as well as from the crew on the
station. Eventually it reached the point
where the crew could use the robotic arm
on the station to grapple the Dragon and
bring it in for docking to the station.
This video displays a compilation of videos
of Dragon taken by the crew as it neared
the station and was captured and docked:
..
On May 26th the crew opened the hatch and
began unloading the craft. They also loaded
it with materials to return to earth. Currently,
Dragon is the only vehicle available to
bring substantial amounts of materials safetly
back from the station.
Run the Satellite
Tracking Tool from BINARY
SPACE right here at HobbySpace
in your browser. The program allows you to track a large
set of satellites in both low earth and geostationary
orbits. (Note: the program requires Microsoft
Silverlight, Version 5 or higher, as well as the latest
version of your browser. Currently the program works on
the Microsoft® Windows® platform only.) The Satellite
Observing section provides additional information
and web resources about the hobby of satellite tracking
and watching.
Real-Time
Space Viewers
Earth
Weather maps, remote sensing
and spysat images.
Space
Weather
Sun, solar wind, aurora images
and the latest data